Thanks for the clarity, Jay. Money comes into the pot and money goes out of the pot. It seems that meeting sponsorship is ring-fenced for meeting costs, but meeting fees are applied more generally. Is that true? Thanks, Adrian -----Original Message----- From: ietf <ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Jay Daley Sent: 01 June 2020 22:27 To: ietf <ietf@xxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: Registration details for IETF 108 Replying to multiple different things: 1. The decision on registration fees is mainly an LLC one so please send any feedback to me. 2. It looks like some people are not aware that we have published a blog post explaining how the fee was set: https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf108-registration-fees/ 3. The choice of 100 fee waivers was based on conversations with sponsors who want to fund the fee waivers specifically. It was not chosen on any assessment of the potential need. 4. The decision on how to allocate fee waivers is for the IESG not the LLC and I will leave it to them to explain their thinking behind a random draw rather than "criteria-based case-by-case decision making". 5. This decision was not trailed on May 14 because there was still a lot of work to be done on the finances - budgets, sponsorship, insurance, etc - to understand *if* we had to charge a fee and what level that should be at, and we did not want to delay an announcement until that was complete. The current situation demands that we do a lot of work in a short time and some compromises need to be made when deciding what to say when. 6. We did not consult on this because there is not enough time for an effective consultation. It would probably have been worse to have asked people their views and then said sorry we don’t have enough time to change anything. 7. The policy about what we charge for was set a long time ago - meeting registration fees are set to cover more than just the cost of the meeting, they also contribute towards the cost of running the IETF in-between meetings. See https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/JUByvYCkSb2WDSt9h4lDkaoe9gc/ for one historic mention of that. If the community wants that changed then the LLC will build a new budget accordingly, but I suggest that is discussed in the context of the overall financial structure of the IETF and how that relates to the aspirations of the IETF for participation, rather than just in the context of meeting finances. While this pandemic feels like it has been with us for a long time, we are still working in exceptional circumstances and having to make decisions where there is limited consensus community guidance as these are circumstances that were only partially foreseen. If the community wants to pick this up then more consensus community guidance around this would be very welcome, particularly if it is ready in plenty of time for IETF 109 in case that also needs to be switched to an online meeting. If there are any questions I’ve missed then please let me know. Jay -- Jay Daley IETF Executive Director jay@xxxxxxxx
